Quantum Life Bodywork News

I am no drunkard, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and fear of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug or soar like an eagle. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too.

JOHN (FIRE) LAME DEER (SIOUX MEDICINE MAN OF THE LAKOTA TRIBE)

Ⓒ Liz Thompson

I will be in Sydney for a healing gathering on that city’s magnificent Northern Beaches on Saturday, December 11.

The focus of the day will be the exploration of the place of individual healing within the healing of the group and ultimately society, and how that healing has an essential connection with the healing of country. In the space of the day there will be the opportunity for individual unfolding within the shared space of the group, and an examination of what that requires in terms of “payment” to the earth.

Numbers will be limited, in order to provide a balance between the individual and group processes, and we will be warmly held in a delightful space overlooking Whale Beach.

Please call or use the contact form to register your interest in attending, and I will be in touch with further details.

For the Earth.

Simon

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2010) — A new system that ranks drugs on the basis of harm caused to both the user and others places alcohol as the most harmful drug, above heroin and crack. The scale, developed by drug experts led by Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London, is published online in The Lancet.

[From Alcohol 'most harmful drug', according to multicriteria analysis]

Somewhat topically, given reports of Ayahuasquero’s facing twenty years in prison for the possession Sacred Medicine, Science Daily reports that state sanctioned drug alcohol is the most damaging drug for both the individual and society. Whilst alcohol is less harmful for the individual than Heroin, Crack and Crystal Meth, the study deemed it overall as at least more than twice as harmful as Crystal meth, cocaine, tobacco, amphetamine/speed, cannabis, GHB, benzodiazepines, ketamine, methadone, mephedrone, butane, khat, ecstacy, anabolic steroids, LSD, buprenorphine and mushrooms.

Consider the amount of money spent “combatting” the latter drugs, and the amount extolling in advertising the glamour of alcohol and one can see that there is something seriously awry with the common cultural viewpoint apropos “drugs”. Is this a case of mere misunderstanding?

In a recent post on Taita Juan, I referenced an arrest of Santo Daime members in the UK. Consider the language used in the commercial media about that case;

A COUPLE have been arrested on suspicion of importing a powerful drug linked to a secretive religion, following a police raid on a Dartington home.

Officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Investigation Team headed up the raid which seized what is believed to be a quantity of ayahuasca — a liquid which contains the powerful hallucinogenic dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, a designated Class A drug in this country….The drug comes in the form of a brown liquid. Police have refused to say where they are keeping the drug until it can be analysed. However it is being stored in special bio hazard bags. Det Sgt Gilroy explained: “At the moment we don’t know how potent it is.”

or more general media coverage here;

Santo Daime: the drug-fuelled religion
A new religion is spreading to Britain – its central sacrament the consumption of a hallucinogenic Class A drug. Here’s a report from the faith’s heartland in the rainforests of the Amazon

[From Santo Daime: the drug-fuelled religion - Times Online]

or here;

The lost and depressed turn to Peruvian ayahuasca rituals for guidance. A Peruvian potion called ayahuasca is drawing foreigners searching for guidance, insight, relief from trauma or a spiritual high

IQUITOS, PERU — Kevin Simmons, a 28-year-old Chicago native, said he “was stuck” — depressed, locked away in his home and taking more than a year to even open his e-mail.

[From Peruvian hallucinogen ayahuasca draws tourists seeking transforming experience]

In that latest article the lack attention to journalistic standards shows clearly in the image of a Huachumero in front of his mesa taking something, possibly Cimora from a shell into his nostril, captioned;

Peruvian Andean soothsayer Erick Caceres, 38, inhales ayahuasca through a shell during a ceremony where soothsayers announce their visions, in the central Lima district of Rimac. A range of healing centers perform rituals related to the potion.

“Soothsayer”, “potion”! Does the Washington Post purport not to understand the pejorative weight of those words in that context? Such kinds of “reporting” shows at least a lack of desire to understand the issues at hand, and at worst a clear attempt to obfuscate and manipulate popular opinion.

There have been a number of studies showing the individual and societal benefits of the Sacred Medicines, and it is these stories that we need to ensure also populate the mainstream media. Not just the stories of “drug arrests” and “ayahausca tourism” disasters, but stories of the immense capacities to heal and correct imbalance that these Teacher Plants offer us. These stories need to be presented as they are, as stories of hope and of individuals making personal and cultural changes for the better, for the healthier, for the more balanced. They need to be told in a manner accessible to other members of that culture, be it the UK, the US, Australia, Spain, or Sweden..

Certainly those stories exist, and in the mainstream media as well. I’ve referenced prior this article in the National Geographic which details an adventurer and writer’s struggle with depression, and the efficacy if not difficulty of her experience with curing in a Peruvian Ayahuasca ritual. There’s another here at the ABC. I’m sure there’s many more…and the potential for many, many more. Please let me know if you have any to share and in that sharing let us change the, seemingly manipulated, public perception and thus this absurd near global prohibition on the practice of this ancient medicinal and spiritual art and science.

In this second instalment of the Quantum Life Podcast, I play a conversation with renowned Herbalist and Author, Susun Weed.

Susun has been a popular figure in US Herbalism for many decades, and it was delightful to hear some of her accumulated wisdom garnered in over 40 years of the study of herbs, and teaching what she terms the Wise Woman Way.

Susun’s Website has a wealth of freely available information and I heartily encourage a visit to www.susunweed.com for anyone interested in learning how to empower, nurture and heal themselves through relationships with plants.

My own interest in Susun’s work was in part how closely her experience of the necessity to form relationships with plants in a real and embodied fashion matches my own, and indeed the central tenets of Curanderismo and Vegitalismo in South America.

Please bear with me in the production of this podcast series. Audio production is something of an art and all of said production, as well as all of the associated web design and maintenance is performed by me with basic resources. This on top of the more immediate work of curing which is my daily responsibility.

These podcasts are offered in the spirit of healing, in the hope that they will open, illuminate and inspire. If you have any feedback please feel free to use the commenting system provided here.

The podcast with Susun is offered in mp3 form, as well as Apple’s extended podcast format which provides images and links to relevant websites.

A conversation with Susun Weed [m4a]

A Conversation with Susun Weed [mp3]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License
Thanks to Dona Otilia, Liz Thompson and Jeremy Yongurra Donovan for additional materials

“When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown, we have to begin with an entirely

different set of questions. What is it? How does it work? Are there recurrent regularities?” Margaret Mead

I wrote recently about the culturally sanctioned belief [and an incredibly resilient one at that] which flies in the face of ever mounting evidence to the contrary, that quantum effects occur at a quantum level and any observation of them in daily human life is evidence of “magical thinking”, superstition or lack of critical facility. Now whilst I agree with Israel Regardie in the matter of their being a great deal of “new age cosmic foo-foo” to sift through in current popular literature around the subject, I believe the matter requires our urgent collective attention, if we are to have any hope of some manner of directing our personal and collective destinies.

Obviously I work in a realm where non human consciousness are not only conceptually considered, but interacted with on a regular basis. These are not abstractions, but rather conscious, self organising and determining entities, with particular personalities who, in certain situations, will interact with the human realm and share their particular wisdoms. By the definitions of a Western reductionist cultural model such ideas are quirky and amusing idiosyncracies to be tolerated at best, or dangerous pathologies to be medicated out of existence at worst, and yet,

“As if it wasn’t bad enough for the military to muck about with mind control, they’re also bent on creating an online, self-teaching artificial intelligence.”

[From Military AI Could Rule the Internet | Wired Science from Wired.com]

Internet Map

So notions of plant sentience are off limits for cultural examinations, but multi million dollar budgets to build the same thing in the machine are up for serious discussions in the rarified halls of the power elite? If nothing else, as the Wired writer suggests;

“there is something vaguely creepy about the idea of greater-than-human artificial intelligence unleashed on the Internet by the military”

Why is it that working in collaboration and harmony with the ecological systems we inhabit is a “fringe” solution, and hurling huge sums of money at technological replications of preexistent structures in nature [which inevitably function with more grace and efficiency] is the dominant course of action to try to ameliorate the damage wrought by our current oil addicted economies?

Again, a regular occurrence in the work conducted here in South America in collaboration with the plants, telepathy when examined in modern intellectual psychological models is largely discounted, unable to be statistically held up as a possibility worthy of serious attention. Again, it’s examination by “fringe” scientists such as evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake are often ridiculed by “serious” scientists and “skeptics”. And yet from here , here and here

“A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy”

Why are these subjects allowable in the cultural domain to be examined for the agenda of dominance and control, for the facilitating of killing people? The use of the such technologies for malefic intent in the Amazon is considered brujeria, or sorcery, yet another notion discounted by modern psychology and philosophy as primitive superstition. and not to be taken seriously. Why are we not spending millions of dollars examining usage [such that has occurred in the Amazon for millenia] in the realms of healing, caring for community and society, and finding visionary means of navigating our way through what is widely held to be a very critical juncture in the evolution of the human species?

A widely quoted aphorism is “the devil’s greatest achievement was to convince humans that he didn’t exist”. If we are to take responsibility for our own destinies [if indeed that is possible] then we must be aware of the possibilities and technologies of consciousness available to us, and be aware that to redress the significant imbalance in the current global mind, we must work actively with those technologies for the betterment of our individual ecosystems and the collective health of the incredible diversity of relations with whom we share this planet. We must have the courage to ask new questions, perhaps uncomfortable ones, if we are to break out of the stupor of our current spiral of self destruction and life denial, as it is clearly obvious that our habituated questionings are not providing us with the answers we need. I have no doubt that we are capable of such a leap of consciousness.

Aho Mitukuye Oyasin

In the course of my day many thoughts and ideas arise, most of which I would like to share and I mentally file these for later expression. As is evidenced by the paucity of posts by me in the last 12 months, this strategy has not been particularly effective. One result of the observation of this is the acknowledgement that I act most effectively in the moment, and that long term planning is definitively not my forte. To this end, I am experimenting with a strategy of posting as thoughts and ideas arise, or as near as possible as is practicable.

Bear with me in this.

So, today I am inspired by the magnitude of possibility. Yesteday I attended to some clients that a friend in the Sacred Valley asked me to see. The actuality of their situations may be told at a later date, but suffice to say that both had been pronounced incurable by the medical systems available here to them and, whilst for many Peruvians the quality of medical treatment available is poor, the same diagnosis would probably have been made in Australia.

One of these clients has been resigned to her fate for some 10 years, and yet in 2 short visits over the course of a couple of weeks those around her have witnessed more change than in the prior decade. I am not offering this for the purpose of self aggrandisement, as I firmly believe such healings are a matter of grace, a confluence of events and people, a matter of right place and time. Nonetheless I feel that there are mechanisms at play which, if explored from a variety of perspectives, would offer much to our develpment of a more sophisticated language with which to point towards healing.

In both of these instances it is obvious that a large part of the capacity to effect change came about by virtue of my capacity to communicate non verbally, as neither of these individuals had, at that time, the capacity to communicate verbally. Probably the most common explanation of this manner of communication would be to refer to words such as clairaudience or telepathy, which may or may not be the case, but I find the common language available in this instance limiting and divisive because both have a pejorative weighting and are not seen as particularly applicable to “real world” curing.

Now obviously the real world is a culturally bound perspective, but there is quite obviously a weight given to the cultural perspective that we in modern western “democracies” adhere to. That this is so was clearly evidenced to me yesterday as I arrived at the small Peruvian town in which my clients lived. Just past the adobe gate to the town was a monstrous billboard which announced, in English, “Cash Available, ATM next left”. Said ATM dispenses US dollars in a region where many live on two or three such dollars a day. US consumer culture is blatantly obvious here, and even by those who cannot afford to participate in it is considered some kind of natural progression. The cultural, economic and environmental cost of this is pronounced.

Here is Wade Davis‘ perspective on such matters.

I can say that the healing afforded these people was a result of grace, and the assistance and direction of the Apus and Pachamamas, the spirits of nature, and celestial sentient beings, which indeed it was, and those who were witness to the events would concur that the winds assisted and the material realm was demonstrably altered by the processes of consciousness enacted therin, but that will not afford me much credibility if I want the cooperation of a mental health research institute in Florida. Nor in fact should it, because I am not Q’ero, am not Chinchero. My genes come from different continents, and my cultural antecedents are worlds apart from those who have for centuries cultivated relationships with the spirits of the mountains and of the elements. I cannot don the intricate weavings of a Q’ero p’aqo, take an initiation and expect to have mystical powers conferred upon me, but I am not so chauvenistic in the house [as it were] of these spirits to suggest that they are a fiction and because I do not believe in them, that they do not exist.

What I am suggesting, however, is that the suffering of two people people was alleviated by seemingly inexplicable means, the whistling of haunting tunes, waving of feathers and blowing of tobacco. In my view this has to be a good thing, and we could afford to spend more time and effort examining how to do this on a much broader scale than I am able to as one individual. In fact, it may be as Davis suggests, that the thoughtful (as opposed to romantic or fanciful) examination of the wisdom of other cultures that, along with our own culture’s technological wizardry, offers us a way through the rather dire mess we as a species find ourselves in on a planetary scale.

My remuneration for my day’s work was a small bottle of water offered by a grateful father [and produced by Coca Cola] and, as I say, the resulting joy and inspiration that such results offered me. I came home and, in the course of subsequent communications stumbled upon this statistic.

I am not suggesting that indigenous cultures are perfect, far from it, nor am I denying my enjoyment of the health and material prosperity which my modern culture offers me, but I am suggesting, as the picture above shows in no uncertain terms, that something is completely and utterly out of whack! If this is representative of a Darwinian evolution of cultural process, if modern western culture is, as Fukuyama suggested some time back, the end of history, then I think perhaps it will be.

I have seen many people come to disappointing realisations about the motivations and idealogies of mestizo curanderos in the last months, and I myself am under no illusions about the nature in which much old knowledge is applied today in Peru. Nor am I under any illusions about my own frailties or limitations, but equally I am not limiting my capacities to conform to a particular cultural framework. Whilst it is so that the old people, the carriers of wisdom in indigenous cultures have much to offer we in the West, so too have we much to offer their cultures insofar as manners in which they can limit the destructive elements of this culture which now touches every inch of the planet, and at an ever increasing pace. Rather than suggest that we can do nothing about the inexorable onslaught of totalitarianism, social surveillance and control, war and ecological and cultural destruction, let us set about building new cultural identities, new languages that reflect our experiences of possibility, not of limitation.

I do not know what to do, other than that which I do, but I am interested in mature, collective discussion about what to do, and I hold great hope for the bringing to the fore the noblest aspects of the human spirit.